Google Books History

In the beginning, there was Google Books.

Well, not exactly. But one can certainly argue that the project is as old as Google itself.
In 1996, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were graduate computer science
students working on a research project supported by the Stanford Digital Library
Technologies Project. Their goal was to make digital libraries work, and their big idea was
as follows: in a future world in which vast collections of books are digitized, people
would use a “web crawler” to index the books’ content and analyze the connections between
them, determining any given book’s relevance and usefulness by tracking the number and
quality of citations from other books.

The crawler they wound up building was called BackRub, and it was this modern twist on
traditional citation analysis that inspired Google’s PageRank algorithms – the core search technology
that makes Google, well, Google.

Even then, Larry and Sergey envisioned people everywhere being able to search through all
of the world’s books to find the ones they’re looking for. What they couldn’t have imagined
was that one day they would launch a project to help make it happen. Herewith, a brief tour
through some of the major milestones so far:

2002

A small group of Googlers officially launches the secret “books” project. They begin
talking to experts about the challenges ahead, starting with a simple but crucial question:
how long would it take to digitally scan every book in the world? It turns out, oddly
enough, that no one knows. In typical Google fashion, Larry Page decides to experiment on
his own. In the office one day, he and Marissa Mayer, one of our first product managers,
use a metronome to keep rhythm as they methodically turn the pages of a 300-page volume. It
takes a full 40 minutes to reach the end.

As part of this fact-finding mission, Larry Page reaches out to the University of Michigan,
his alma mater and a pioneer in library digitization efforts including JSTOR and Making
of America. When he learns that the current estimate for scanning the university
library’s seven million volumes is 1,000 years, he tells university president Mary
Sue Coleman he believes Google can help make it happen in six.

2003

A team member travels to a charity book fair in Phoenix, Arizona, to acquire books for
testing non-destructive scanning techniques. After countless rounds of experimentation, the
team develops a scanning method that’s much gentler than current common high-speed
processes. This makes the team happy – and the books themselves even happier.

At the same time, the team’s software engineers make progress toward resolving the tricky
technical issues they encounter processing information from books that contain odd type
sizes, unusual fonts or other unexpected peculiarities – in 430 different languages.

2004

Established in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley, the mission of the Bodleian library at Oxford
University has always been to serve not just the university community but the entire world.
The team visits the renowned library and is overwhelmed by the warm reception they receive.

During a tour of the stacks, the librarians bring out centuries-old “uncut” books that have
only rarely seen the light of day. For the first time since Shakespeare was a working
playwright, the dream of exponentially expanding the small circle of literary scholars with
access to these books seems within reach.

The visit is inspiring, and follow-up meetings and discussions lead to a formal partnership to digitize the
library’s incomparable collection of more than one million 19th-century public domain books
within three years.

Meanwhile, a series of exploratory talks with some of the world’s biggest publishers begins
to bear fruit. In October, Larry and Sergey announce “Google Print” at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. The
first publishers to join the program: Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, the University
of Chicago Press, Houghton Mifflin, Hyperion, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press,
Pearson, Penguin, Perseus, Princeton University Press, Springer, Taylor & Francis,
Thomson Delmar and Warner Books.

In December, we announce the beginning of the
“Google Print” Library
Project, made possible by partnerships with Harvard, the University of Michigan, the
New York Public Library, Oxford and Stanford. The combined collections at these
extraordinary libraries are estimated to exceed 15 million volumes.

2005

One year after Google Print’s debut, the team returns to the Frankfurt Book Fair to reveal
that “Google Print” is now accepting partners in eight European countries: Austria,
Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.

In keeping with our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful, we donate
$3 million to the Library of Congress to help build the World Digital Library, which will
provide online access to a collection of rare and unique items from all around the world.
We also extend our pilot scanning program with the Library, which includes digitizing works
of historical value from the Library of Congress Law Library.

Google renames
“Google Print” Google Books, which more accurately reflects how people use it. The team
also responds to the controversy over the Library Project by engaging in public debate about
its underlying principles.

2006

In a moving speech at
the Association of American Publishers (AAP), University of Michigan president Mary Sue
Coleman explains why the university has chosen to partner with us on the Library Project,
underscoring the importance of digitizing books in the face of natural disasters like
Hurricane Katrina and adding, “We believed in this forever."

In March we attend the London Book Fair, where
some of our publisher partners share their experiences so far.

Shortly afterward, we invite our partners to tell us whether they wish to sell readers full
access to books online – right in their browsers. This is the first of many new options
we’re developing in close collaboration with publishers to help them experiment with
innovative ways to sell books online.

We launch a series of product enhancements to make Book Search more useful and easier to
use. First, we expand access to the public domain works we’ve scanned by adding a download a PDF button
to all out-of-copyright books. A few months later, we release a new browsing
interface that makes it easier to browse and navigate Book Search. The new interface is
also accompanied by new About this Book
pages which use Google algorithms to populate pages with rich related content on a book --
initially, related books, selected pages and references from scholarly works.

In the fall, four new libraries join the Library Project: the University of California,
University Complutense of Madrid, the University of Wisconsin- Madison and the University
of Virginia.

2007

Using the new UI as a launching point, we experiment with new ways for people to interact
with books.

Places in this
Book: A mashup with Maps lets people browse books by locations mentioned in the text
(later, we release an experimental KML layer for
Google Earth that does the reverse -- the user picks a location, and we map books to it).

Popular Passages: We create a new
way to navigate between books, tracking the use of a single passage through a collection
of books.

My
Library: We help people harness the power of Google search within their own personal
book collections. Users begin to curate and share their personal
libraries, reviews and ratings with others.

New homepage (initially US only): We give people more jumping off points
for exploring the books in our index.

In May, the Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne, and Ghent University
Library join the Book Search program, adding a substantial amount of books in French,
German, Flemish, Latin and other languages, and bringing the total number of European
libraries partners to six.

In July, we add a “View plain text” link to all out-of-copyright books. T.V. Raman explains how this
opens the book to adaptive technologies such as screen readers and Braille display,
allowing visually impaired users to read these books just as easily as users with sight.

By December, the Book Search interface is available in over 35 languages, from Japanese to Czech to
Finnish. Over 10,000 publishers and authors
from 100+ countries are
participating in the Book Search Partner Program. The Library Project expands to
28 partners, including seven international library partners: Oxford University (UK),
University of Complutense of Madrid (Spain), the National Library of Catalonia (Spain),
University Library of Lausanne (Switzerland), Ghent University (Belgium) and Keio
University (Japan).

As we look to the year ahead, we continue to develop our technology and expand our
partnerships with publishers and libraries all around the world. Stay tuned...